When Tupac was eleven, his stepfather Mutulu Shakur was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. To Tupac he remained more an idea than an everyday presence: a stepfather who spent most of his life underground or in prison, yet still shaped how Tupac thought about politics, loyalty and THUG LIFE.
A name from the movement
He was born Jeral Wayne Williams on August 8, 1950, in Baltimore and grew up in Jamaica, Queens, with his blind mother. According to his family, his political awareness was awakened while he helped her navigate the welfare system. At 16 he joined the New Afrikan independence movement, which called for a separate Black nation on US soil. The Revolutionary Action Movement and the Republic of New Afrika came later.
Like other young activists, he took the name Shakur. The family describes Salahdeen “Aba” Shakur, the father of Lumumba and Zayd Shakur, as his “revolutionary and spiritual father.” Mutulu counted Lumumba and Zayd among his brothers all his life, in the political rather than the biological sense.
Needles against withdrawal
From 1970 he worked at Lincoln Detox in the South Bronx. Activists from the Black Panthers and the Young Lords had built the drug treatment program at Lincoln Hospital together with people struggling with addiction. Mutulu used acupuncture there to ease withdrawal. The five-point protocol he helped develop is still used in addiction treatment.
He stayed until 1978. After training in Canada and China he was licensed as an acupuncturist in California in 1979. In New York he co-directed the Black Acupuncture Advisory Association of North America and the Harlem Institute of Acupuncture. That is where the title “Dr.” came from, the name friends and family called him by.
Seven years at Afeni’s side
In 1975 he married Afeni Shakur, and their daughter Sekyiwa was born the same year. Tupac was four at the time. The marriage lasted until 1982. Mutulu had other children, among them Maurice “Mopreme” Shakur, with whom Tupac would later found THUG LIFE.
Nanuet, October 1981
In October 1981 an armed group robbed a Brink’s armored truck in Nanuet, New York, and got away with $1.6 million. The guard Peter Paige and police officers Edward O’Grady and Waverly Brown were killed. Investigators saw Mutulu as the leader of the group. In July 1982 the FBI put him on its Ten Most Wanted list. He was not arrested until February 12, 1986, in California.
In 1988 a federal court sentenced him to 60 years. The counts were RICO conspiracy, under a federal law aimed at organized crime, as well as armed bank robbery and bank robbery murder. The charges also covered his role in freeing Assata Shakur from a New Jersey prison in 1979.
Mutulu and his supporters saw him as a political prisoner; the victims’ families and the courts saw a murderer. Both belong to his story.
Rules from a cell, letters after a death
From prison he stayed in touch with Tupac. In 1992 the two of them wrote the “Code of THUG LIFE,” 26 rules meant to curb senseless violence, for instance by ruling out attacks on bystanders, children or the elderly. The family calls Mutulu the mind behind the idea of turning THUG LIFE into a social movement.
After Tupac’s death, Mutulu wrote a farewell letter, which was published in German in 2004. In it he sends greetings to the family’s departed comrades, among them Zayd, Lumumba and “Brother Leggs,” and signs off as “your father, friend, comrade.”
A second letter went to the family of Christopher Wallace (The Notorious B.I.G.). The Shakurs offered their condolences to his mother, widow and children and warned against using the two murders to fuel a war between the East and West Coasts. They urged people to search for the truth rather than revenge.
Free after almost 37 years
In prison Mutulu developed multiple myeloma, a cancer of the bone marrow. After years of campaigning, the U.S. Parole Commission granted his release in the fall of 2022, finding his medical condition rendered him “so infirm of mind and body” that he no longer posed a danger. On December 16, 2022, he walked free after almost 37 years.
He died on July 7, 2023, aged 72, in Los Angeles, surrounded by his family. He was survived by six children: Mopreme, Talib, Ayize Jama-Everett, Sekyiwa, Nzingha Shakur-Ali and Chinua.
His estate goes to court
On April 28, 2026, Mopreme, as administrator of Mutulu’s estate, filed a wrongful death suit over Tupac’s killing in Los Angeles County Superior Court, naming among others Duane “Keffe D” Davis.
On August 31, 2026, a Las Vegas jury found Davis guilty of first-degree murder with use of a deadly weapon. Sentencing is set for October 13, 2026. Davis has said he will appeal, and the verdict is not final (as of October 2026). Through his estate, the man a federal court convicted in 1988 now stands on the side of the plaintiffs.